Canadian Broadcast Standards Council – Privacy Policy
Last Update: October 2018
The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (“CBSC”, “we” or “us”) respects the privacy of all of its website visitors and users of its complaints resolution process. This privacy policy explains how your Personal Information will be handled by CBSC, and the purposes for which it will be used.
This Privacy Policy contains important information on our commitment to the protection of your Personal Information, including:
By using our website (at www.cbsc.ca) (“the Site”), filing a complaint, making an inquiry, or otherwise providing your Personal Information to us or contacting us, you agree that we may collect, use and disclose your information according to the terms of this policy. If you wish to withdraw this consent, you may do so at any time, by contacting us at the email or phone number listed below. Please note, however, that if you do withdraw your consent, we will not be able to address your inquiry or complaint.
The term “Personal Information” means any information recorded about an identifiable individual, whether factual or subjective, but does not include the business contact information about an employee of an organization, where used to contact that individual in connection with their business role. Information that is in an aggregated or anonymized form is also not considered to be Personal Information.
The CBSC collects Personal Information that you provide to us directly, or that a service provider or regulator may provide to us, as part of our complaints resolution process, or with respect to an inquiry you may make. In order to file a complaint, individuals must provide us with their full name and either an email or civic address. We may also collect other types of Personal Information that you choose to provide to us in the context of the complaint.
We also collect some information through your interactions with our Site, obtained through the use of cookies and tracking technologies. This may include information about your browser type, the configuration of your computer and the display of our Site, referring Sites, time zone, language, service provider, and IP addresses. The use of cookies and tracking technologies is further discussed in the “Use of Cookies and Tracking Technologies” section, below.
Generally speaking, we will only use the Personal Information that you provide to us through our complaints resolution process to investigate and address complaints. In order to allow us to do so, this Personal Information will be shared with the broadcaster associate that is the subject of the complaint. Where appropriate, your information may also be shared with a referral agency such as the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) or Ad Standards, who may be better able to handle the concerns expressed in the correspondence. In such cases, your information is shared with these third parties solely for the purposes of responding to the complaint.
We may also use Personal Information to:
We may generally disclose Personal Information to respond to legal requirements, enforce our policies, or protect anyone’s rights, property, or safety. Such information will be disclosed in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
From time to time, CBSC may disclose Personal Information to third parties who provide services to us or on our behalf, such as providers of legal services, courier delivery or IT support. When we do engage such third parties, we will limit disclosure to only the Personal Information that is reasonably necessary for the purpose or service for which the third-party service provider is engaged. We will use contractual and other means to provide a comparable level of protection while the information is being processed by these third-party service providers.
We will not use or disclose your Personal Information for any other purpose, without obtaining your further consent.
If you do wish to receive the CBSC’s e-mailings, you may make a specific request to the CBSC Secretariat at [email protected].
Subject to certain legal restrictions (such as where information about you contains the Personal Information of a third party) you may access the Personal Information we hold about you, by contacting us, in writing, as set out below under Contact Us. Please note that we will ask you to verify your identity before we act on your request. If any information that you have provided to us has changed, you may also provide us with the new information in order for us to maintain the accuracy of the information we have collected about you.
We will retain your Personal Information for only so long as is necessary to fulfil the purposes for which it was collected, and for such periods of time as may be required to comply with applicable law.
When your Personal Information is no longer required, we will make all reasonable efforts to ensure all electronic and hard copies of such information are securely destroyed and irreversibly deleted from our systems. However, where your information has been provided to third parties for certain purposes, like the provision of legal services, these third parties may retain the information in accordance with legal requirements.
We maintain a variety of physical, organizational and technical safeguards designed to protect your information against loss, misuse, unauthorized access, or disclosure. However, due to the inherent uncertainty in the use of the internet and information systems, we cannot guarantee that the use of our website, including our contact and complaint forms, will be completely safe or secure.
As discussed above, we use cookies in order to identify your browser and ensure our Site appears as intended for our users.
Cookies are small pieces of data stored on your device that identify your browser/IP address – but not you as an individual – to our computers each time you visit our Site. We do not use cookies for any advertising or marketing purposes. Many browsers offer a “private browsing” mode to turn off the use of cookies. The use of private browsing may affect the appearance of our Site on your display.
We also track aggregated statistics about users of our Site to better understand how our Site is being accessed and used.
More information about cookies can be found at
Our Site may contain links to other sites. While we try to link only to sites that share our high standards and respect for privacy, please understand that we are not responsible for the content of, or the privacy practices employed by other sites.
We may amend this Privacy Policy from time to time, for example, as our role and organization develops, in response to legal developments, or as new technologies become available.
When we make changes to this Privacy Policy we will revise the “last updated” date at the top of the policy. You should check back here periodically to find out if any changes have been made to this Privacy Policy. If we make substantial changes we will, as appropriate, prominently post these changes to our Site or notify affected individuals directly.
Continuing to access our Site or use our services after we post or communicate a change signifies that you consent to the revised terms of the Privacy Policy.
If you have any questions about the policy, or wish to obtain access to any Personal Information that we may hold about you, you may contact us as follows:
CBSC Manager Operations and Administration
Email: [email protected]
Telephone: 613-233-4607 ext. 110
Toll Free: 1-866-696-4718
Mail: CBSC
P.O. Box 3265 Station D
Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 6H8